Educating the retailers

This week has been very exciting so far!  I met with several local Denver bookstores and synagogue book shops.  The synagogues knew right away what I was talking about when I mentioned the Passover Bingo game, no explanation needed.  The large independently owned bookshop . . . well that was another story.  First I had to pretty much stalk the buyer, who is crammed into an office in the basement with piles of products to review.  No wonder he was too busy to return my calls!  I presented him with the Passover Bingo game, and he wondered if it would be as popular as the Hanukkah gifts.  I told him that no matter how you spell it, Chanukah is only made into a bigger deal of a holiday because it falls near Christmas, and that more Jews have Passover seders than celebrate any other Jewish holiday.  With this fresh knowledge, he took another look at the game and ordered some for the stores!  Yippee!  Had a similar experience at a housewares chain, which will be written about in a future post.  Meanwhile, only one day left in our Jewcer campaign, http://jewcer.com/project/passover-bingo-game

The fulfillment team has been busy getting the games ready for shipment!  I am very grateful to have a kind and responsive team supporting me.

Friends make the virtual world go round . . .

Here's a cool statistic: there are over 36,000 friends of our the Fans on our Facebook page. Surely there are 80 or so among them, who will buy a game this week and help us meet our Jewcer goal? http://jewcer.com/project/passover-bingo-game

Milestones

We celebrated several milestones this week.  The first "live" order (to a friend, at lunch, but that still counts, right?) and our first internet order!  Woo hoo!  We are growing in Twitter and Facebook followers, too.  Most exciting is the fact that we now have Facebook fans who we don't personally know.  The Facebook "insights" page shows that we have several hundred people who saw our posts or comments on our posts, and tens of thousands of potential eyeballs who are friends of our fans.  This is all very exciting, and add to that the fact that our credit card processing system is back up and running again.  Phew!  What a week. 

Creating a Passover Game. . .

Creating a new game has been quite a learning experience.  I thought it would be simple:  design the game, find a manufacturer, order, and sell.  Oh, but there are so many intermediate steps!   Customs.  Two different web guys (one who helped out of the goodness of his heart; the other to whom we paid a pretty penny).  Payment gateways.  Customs brokers.  Logistics centers.  Warehouse and fulfillment centers -- the first one tried to screw us in so many ways!  But, it was all worth it when we went to the warehouse the other day and saw the pallets of gleaming Passover Bingo games sitting there, ready to get into the hot hands of people who want to be ready for the holiday.  Absolutely thrilled with the quality, and with the fulfillment center we eventually ended up with, who loves small businesses.  Hoping that the sales go quickly and smoothly so we can order another batch before Passover 2013!